How To Save A Quarter Million IT Dollars (or More) in Less Than a Year

As we talk to more and more businesses about their plans for PerfectStorage, the implementations get more and more interesting. Take our recent discussions with a global cloud-based software company with over 10.5 million users in multiple organizations across 189 countries:

This company makes acquisitions of HP 3PAR storage in increments of 25 terabytes for approximately $250,000 — it’s a big deal and not taken lightly. Currently, the company uses SDelete, a manual process that consumes 15 – 20 hours a month of their storage administrator’s time to reclaim thin-provisioned space.

The good news is that the 3PAR storage is zero-fill-enabled. But from there, reclaiming space gets tricky. The storage administrator needs to coordinate across an organization for acceptable times to take high-use applications offline so SDelete can be run. SDelete itself often caused problems when running, with various processes hanging.

To try to attempt how much and where space can be reclaimed, the storage administrator would log in to monitor its 3PAR devices and check to see if a they were good candidates for space reclamation. Those using that storage would then need to be notified that their server would be worked on. The process to determine how much space might be available for space reclamation is a guess made through various calculations. And it was just that — a guess.

With PerfectStorage, by the storage administrator’s own estimates and storage hardware purchase history:

The company will reduce the 15 – 20 hours per month spent managing and administering SDelete down to 1 -2 hours, or by 80% – 90%. This translates to several thousand HR dollars saved every year, with the added benefit of storage administrators being freed up for other tasks.

But even bigger savings comes in the delay and potential redistribution of storage acquisitions. The company purchases HP 3PAR equipment in blocks of 25 terabytes at a cost of approximately $250,000 every few months. But it estimates that those purchases can be delayed by 9 – 12 months by using PerfectStorage.

With these savings, the organization exhibits much better cash management as well as better storage management. And with its close ties to HP, it’s in a better position to potentially redistribute its acquisitions to other HP investments.

Are you spending unnecessary time fighting SDelete and guessing about your next storage acquisition?